Actress Sally Kellerman had a long and illustrious career before her recent passing in February
of 2022.
While she was perhaps best known for her role as Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan
in the seminal 1970 war comedy film MASH, she had a long list of impressive performances
over her more than 60-year career.
Some of her other notable performances came in movies like Last of the Red Hot Lovers
and the 1980’s classic Rodney Dangerfield comedy, Back to School.
Kellerman was also a skilled vocalist.
She signed a record deal early on in her life with Verve Records.
But the rigors of becoming a recording artist proved too much for the young starlet, and
she bailed on the contract.
However, she later recorded two albums and added songs and vocal performances to several
movie soundtracks.
Her sultry voice was also ideally suited to voiceover work, and she became the voice of
many brands like Revlon, Hidden Valley Ranch, and Mercedes Benz.
In this video, we're taking a look at the life and career of Sally Kellerman, as well
as some of her notable relationships.
So join Facts Verse, as we examine how Sally Kellerman Had a Long List of Tragic Affairs.
Her Early Life Sally Kellerman was born on the 2nd of June,
1937 in Long Beach, California.
Her mother, Edith, taught piano locally, while her father was an executive for Shell Oil.
Sally had an older sister named Diana, while her younger sister sadly died as an infant.
The family adhered to the Christian Science faith.
When Sally was around 10 years old, her family moved to form Long Beach to the San Fernando
Valley, which put her much closer to Hollywood.
But despite being fairly close to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, their actual neighborhood,
Granada Hills, was much more rural and sparsely populated.
Preferring not to live in such a remote feeling area, the Kellerman family moved to Park La
Brea in Los Angeles when Sally was 16.
This allowed her to go to Hollywood High School, where she rubbed elbows with young stars and
children of the Hollywood elite.
But Sally didn't immediately make good use of these connections.
She was quite tall for her age, and her awkward physicality made her very shy.
As such, she had trouble making friends at Hollywood High.
She also did poorly in school.
Yet she began the path towards acting success by performing in the school’s rendition
of Meet Me in St. Louis.
She went on to attend LA City College, also enrolling in private acting classes.
She got a part in the play “Look Back in Anger” and performed alongside her acting
class friends, such as Jack Nicholson and Robert Blake.
She eventually joined the Actors Studio West and got her first movie role in the movie
Reform School Girl.
Hot Lips was her most famous role While it wasn’t the first role she’d gotten,
when she was picked by Robert Altman to play Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in
his movie MASH, she knew her life was about to change.
The role was her big breakthrough in Hollywood and paved the way for a long and illustrious
acting career.
And her performance as Hot Lips didn’t go unrewarded.
She was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for the role.
She also came in second in the running for Best Supporting Actress from the National
Society of Film Critics, as well as winning the Golden Laurel Award for comedy performance.
When asked about her time on set of MASH, Kellerman had nothing but amazing things to
say.
In an interview with ign.com in 2012, she likened the experience to be like summer camp.
She was thrilled to be working with legendary director Robert Altman and said he gave her
some excellent advice early on in the shoot.
That was to simply give in to the silliness and fun of the experience, and simply giggle
through it and enjoy the process.
This allowed her to stay loose and give an incredible performance in the film.
She said that a change from her usual audition tactics actually helped her get the part in
the first place.
She was generally unsure of the way her lips looked, so she did little to accentuate them
in auditions.
This meant never wearing lipstick.
But right before she went to audition for MASH, she had a meeting to go to.
For this, she was fine wearing lipstick.
But she forgot that she had it on when she went in to see Robert Altman for the MASH
audition.
Impressed not only by her acting but also by her lips, Altman told her in the room that
he planned to give her the best role in the movie: Hot Lips.
So she managed to accidentally turn her insecurity about his lips into a role specifically written
around sultry and luscious lips!
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Kellerman turned down Marlon Brando Perhaps the biggest star that Kellerman was
involved with was legendary actor Marlon Brando.
However, unlike some other people in her life, her relationship with Brando was one of rejection.
That is to say, she rejected the Hollywood icon!
In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Kellerman told of her years working as a waitress in
a restaurant in Los Angeles.
Since the restaurant was in Hollywood and was a favorite among the Hollywood set, Kellerman
waited on more than her fair share of celebs.
In fact, she told the Sun that she waited on many more stars during that period than
she worked with when she entered the world of acting.
Kellerman was already a huge fan of Marlon Brando when he came to her restaurant one
night.
She said that she had long identified with him, since she had been overweight and geeky
teen in high school, and she heard that he had been the same.
She said that commonality likely meant that he would understand her life much better than
other celebs.
And Sally was clearly passionate about her fandom of Marlon, as she admitted to seeing
all of his movies at least seven times over!
One night as she was finishing up her shift, she was on the street next to the restaurant
and saw Marlon peering out of an old, janky car.
She was shocked to find that he wasn’t in a limo or fancy sports car.
This made her an even bigger fan of his.
Over the course of her time working at the restaurant, she got to know Marlon as a friend,
since he would often come to eat there.
Finally, the two of them went on a date.
But she admits that when the time came and he made sexual advances toward her, she rejected
him.
She said this made Marlon quite frustrated and even mad since he felt he had wasted his
night wining and dining with her.
Kellerman said that Brando was banging the drawers of his bedroom in frustration.
But Kellerman held firm, not wanting to burst the bubble of her image of the Hollywood icon.
However, she later regretted the decision.
In an interview with The Village Voice years later, she referred to that night as “a
mistake I won't be making in my next life."
Sally’s Relationships One of Sally’s earliest relationships was
to actor William Duffy.
But this quickly went south after Sally unexpectedly became pregnant in 1961.
But Sally was not in a place to have a child and sought an abortion.
Since Sally’s family was Christian Scientists, they shunned the use of medical help from
doctors and hospitals, per the tenets of the faith.
As such, Sally had a home abortion.
Sadly this abortion was botched, forcing Kellerman to be rushed to a hospital.
This was her first time ever being inside one.
Later in the decade, she dated Lawrence Hauben, an actor, and writer.
The notable thing about this relationship is that Hauben actually filmed much of their
time together to make a documentary about it.
He called it Venus, and it actually had a theatrical realize in 1971, albeit a small
one.
After MASH was released, Kellerman got married to Rick Edelstein, who was a producer of the
show Starsky and Hutch.
But this relationship was apparently doomed from the start, as the two split only two
years later.
Kellerman once revealed in an interview that the two of them fought constantly, beginning
the day that they met.
Later on, she dated Grand Funk Railroad band member Mark Farmer.
This was particularly notable in that it resulted in a Grand Funk song called “Sally” on
their album Born To Die that was dedicated to Kellerman.
In it, Farmer expressed undying love for Sally.
Sadly their relationship wasn’t as successful as the song predicted, and the two eventually
split.
Kellerman had a slew of Hollywood-0cetnric relationships over the next few years.
These included time spent with actor Edd Byrnes and screenwriters Charles Shyer and David
Rayfiel.
She also dated producer Jon Peters and journalist Warren Hoge.
But she found her strongest relationship when she met Jonathan D. Krane.
The two were married from 1980 until Jonathan passed away from a heart attack 36 years later.
But while this was by far the longest relationship of Kellerman’s life, it wasn’t without
its challenges.
The two reportedly had several issues with infidelity over the course of their many years
together, and this resulted in two separate periods of separation.
Still, the two managed to reconcile each time and stayed together until Krane died.
Now it’s time to hear from you.
What’s your favorite memory of Sally Kellerman?
Let us know in the comments section below.
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haven’t already.
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